


Hard to Find

by garglyswoof



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: Angst, Because is there any happiness after s1, F/M, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-21 23:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17651708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garglyswoof/pseuds/garglyswoof
Summary: Kovacs thinks about what home means in his scattered life. Maybe it's a place. Maybe it's her. Maybe it's all of them.





	Hard to Find

**Author's Note:**

> Title and a line in this fic from the national song.

Home.

He sees it sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, a flash of the world he’d once known like an echo on his vision that even the neon of this new world can’t burn out. Harlan’s world, the spruces rising up like a crown around the mountains. The bridges that span chasms nestled deep between the peaks. The Songspire tree. A pen clutched in his hand, writing words his heart can’t contain.

He’d almost killed Bancroft when he’d seen it. Quell was right, she was right and he’d woken up 250 years after losing her with memories from yesterday and her words screaming in his mind as Bancroft flipped idly through the pages of his and Quell’s ink long-dried. A toy. A fucking toy in the hands of what Quell had always feared, the rich that own the world.

Home.

He sees her often, his heart so full of her it tests the edges of its bounds, pushing, stretching tissue, alive. She’s leaning against the wall outside The Raven, enigmatic smile curling her lips, lips so full and warm and they’d been his, his for such a fleeting fucking moment and goddamn it she had taught him everything but how to live without her. She watches him as he fucks Bancroft’s wife and despite all the pheromones, despite the unquestionable high of her king’s ransom sleeve, all he sees is Quell. Them together, next to the stream with water so cold it burned his throat going down, her skin dark against his own.

Home.

He’s been in so many sleeves, needlecasting his way to a thousand killshots, following orders, the red lights in his helmet a home in their own right, but it his skin, that his mother birthed him in, that he always sees. So it’s no surprise that even though physical identity is a loose construct these days, the mirror is still a shock, and so is the look in Ortega’s eyes.

There is something between them and it hurt when he figured out why, so he is at her apartment, demanding answers, because something in him wants a different one. There is no other reason to be here, he thinks, as she finally admits; her shoulders slump, her voice defeated. He asks her then - Who do you see? and waits for her to close the door on this.

She doesn’t, and part of his heart that is still open and free and not calling to home responds. She is someone that could hurt but Quell’s already done that. She is faithful and stubborn and her skin, her skin is so soft as her body curls around him. They are beautiful and close and warm and he wants to pass it off as just that but he can’t.

Because he realizes later that he didn’t think of Quell once.

Home.

All these things that are his home are in his heart, burned into it like acid etchings. This same heart that races as he careens down the stairwell, trying to beat the elevator. The walls are too thick to sense what’s going on but he knows, he knows and he banks the terror with training as he chases the elevator back up a floor. His feelings are against protocol as the door slides open to reveal its grisly tableau. He can tell her partner is dead from a glance but she is there, still there, bleeding out and barely coherent, her own heart joining his in his throat as she worries about her partner, uncaring that she’s close to death.

God, her heart, this fluttering thing. This thing that defies its bounds. He is a broken, partial thing and he cannot. He can’t. He fucking can’t, ok? When he hears the name of his sleeve falling off her lips he uses it as proof that he’s right and he makes a resolution, because of that fluttering heart of hers.

She’s so fucking smart, of course she figures it out. Figures out what he’s saying behind his words and she’s there despite his best intentions to protect. There’s no time and his brain is a haze of doublesleeving, the world melting at the edges, the spruces peeking through, Quell in his periphery like an angel urging him on, slipping away when he rips off the VR feed from Ortega’s head.

Home.

He doesn’t want to give up the memory of her voice pleading for him to escape, but he does.

Because there are other memories still there, lodged in his heart with the hope that his sister has given him. Quell is out there, and he cannot let go.

Ortega sees it in his face, and he sees the resignation in hers. He wants to tell her that she’s in his heart now, but he thinks she already knows. He finds himself thinking of other lifetimes, a thought that surprises him. He believes in real death, doesn’t he? Doesn’t he believe in everything Quell fought to unravel? He does and he doesn’t. Because sometimes you can recognize the promise of something and you don’t want to let go, despite every bit of resolve, despite every words of a creed you utter.

So when he wakes up in a new sleeve and thinks of home, he thinks of ash falling like snow, he thinks of Quell shouting his name, he thinks of all these things but there on the edges she lies, spouting furious Spanish that he cannot understand in its speed. She is there and she is part of him, a promise he will keep, as home.


End file.
